Re: GNU poke 1.0 released

[Jose E. Marchesi]

Hi Benno.

Thanks for looking at the 1.0 tarball.

> Op 26-02-2021 om 11:17 schreef Jose E. Marchesi:
>> The tarball poke-1.0.tar.gz is now available at
>> https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/poke/poke-1.0.tar.gz.
>
> In the POT file I noticed this:
>
>     msgid " cutoff should be between 0 and 15.\n"
>
> An error message that starts with a space and ends with a period...
> That is probably not right.
>
> Looking into poke/pk-cmd-ios.c and poke/pk-cmd-set.c I several "error: "
> strings and subsequent error messages that are not wrapped in _() calls.
> Some of those error messages begin with a space or end in a period, but
> others don't.  I think they should all have the same form?  No leading
> space, and no period.

I just fixed all these cases.

>     msgid "For help, type \""
>
> This is unfortunate.  Some languages translate "" to «» or „”, but here the
> closing \" is not part of this translatable string and will thus remain ".
> To make a program translatable, each message needs to be gettextized in its
> entirety, not in fragments.  Would it be possible to construct the message
> upfront so that the gettextized string becomes _("For help, type \"%s\"")
> or something similar?

Not really, because of our use of terminal hyperlinks.  I just pushed a
patch that changes the code to this:

          pk_puts (_("For help, type"));
          pk_puts (" \"");
          pk_term_hyperlink (help_hyperlink, NULL);
          pk_puts (".help");
          pk_term_end_hyperlink ();
          pk_puts ("\".\n");
          free (help_hyperlink);

i.e. now the double quotes are not gettextized.  I am aware splitting
sentences like this is complicated for internationalization, but I can't
see how to solve this without splitting.  Any idea?


> I see that you use the `' quoting style instead of ''.  That is fine by me,
> but the GNU coding standards advice against it:
>
>     https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Quote-Characters.html

Yes that is a very deliberated act on my part :)